Documentary Harold and Lillian Is a Wonderful Paradox: An Educational Tearjerker

The frequently repeated adage “Film is a collaborative medium” is a cliché because it’s true. But it’s also true, and unfortunate, that a disproportionate amount of public glory goes to maybe just 10 percent of the collaborators who make a film—great, good, bad, or indifferent—the thing it is.

Documentarian Daniel Raim has, in his own small but not insignificant way, been working to correct that over the past 15 years, by shedding a cinematic light on the collaborators who prove indispensable in giving movies their look. His 2000 feature, The Man on Lincoln’s Nose, was a nifty if too-short primer on production design. His longer 2010 film, Something’s Gonna Live, took viewers into the world of production designer Robert F. Boyle, whose work on films like North by Northwest and Cape Fear was featured heavily in the prior picture. Raim’s latest feature blends professional lore and wonkiness with a terrifically moving human story and is, therefore, his best yet. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story premieres at the esteemed DOC NYC Festival, on Tuesday, after bowing in France earlier this year as part of the Cannes Film Festival’s “classics” section.

Raim’s movie opens with the unmistakable voice of Danny DeVito, who’s also one of the film’s executive producers, talking of the Hollywood “secret weapons” whose frequently uncredited contributions to a given project “enhanced the quality of the movies.” The movie’s title subjects are Harold Michelson, a storyboard artist extraordinaire, and his wife, Lillian Michelson, who helped assemble and oversee one of the most exhaustive and useful research libraries in all of the American film industry. The movie helpfully defines for the viewer what a storyboard is and what a storyboard artist does, but at the same time, the movie quickly establishes that Harold Michelson was much more than a guy who was deft with pen and charcoal—he was a great ideas man. Mel Brooks recalls working with Michelson on a particular space-opera parody: Michelson was sketching out the garb for a group of Star Wars–mocking “stormtroopers,” and coming up with ways to up the funny quotient. “Harold changed the helmets,” Brooks recalls on camera, rounding off the tops of them. Suddenly, the title Brooks was wedded to for his comedy Spaceballs made a little more sense. “The little goodies that Harold could give you can make you look like a great filmmaker,” Brooks concludes.

Courtesy of Adama Films.

An impressive array of other filmmakers, critics, and scholars all echo that sentiment. Talking heads here include Francis Ford Coppola, producer Stuart Cornfeld, critic and author Bill Krohn, and many more. These guys convey a wealth of Filmmaking-101-and-beyond information, but this all goes hand in hand with a truly charming personal tale of Harold’s determined wooing of his kid sister’s best friend Lillian, who was raised an orphan with a real yearning for connection. The couple eloped to Hollywood shortly after Harold completed service in World War II, serving as a bombardier. (Lillian speculates that it was Harold’s precision work with bombsight technology that gave him the ability to function as something of a human lens when he was working out perspectives for his storyboards.)

Their romance and growth into a family is conveyed via the conventional voice-over interviews and archival footage, but given a new and utterly disarming dimension in the form of quasi-storyboard illustrations of key moments, rendered in a tribute to Michelson’s own style by contemporary storyboard artist Patrick Mate. Lillian’s own achievements as an ace researcher stemmed from her desire to help Harold in his work, and she soon became known as a stickler for accuracy who would stop at nothing to find or create the desired documentation. (Well, almost nothing—Harold seriously balked when Lillian told him she was going to have a shady acquaintance of hers shuttle her to South America to photograph cocaine labs for the Al Pacino–starring Scarface.)

A storyboard by Patrick Mate from the film.

Courtesy of Adama Films.

It’s amazing what Lillian was able to do while raising three boys, the first of whom suffered from autism at a time when autism was considered psychological and not organic; Lillian’s righteous rage over the way she and her son were treated by Freudian psychiatrists of the 1950s resonates long after the movie ends.

As much as the movie celebrates unsung heroes of film, it’s hardly director unfriendly. Harold speaks of Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he worked on The Birds and Marnie, with great reverence, calling him the “man who in my opinion is cinema.” (Hitchcock himself began his career as an inter-title artist in the silents, and once tsk-tsked to François Truffaut, “even adults all too often believe that one can become a director without knowing how to sketch a décor, or how to edit.”) There’s also a great section on the give-and-take between Harold and Mike Nichols on The Graduate. The inside-baseball stuff walks hand in hand with a great romance, and this movie winds up being a rather wonderful paradox on the face of it: an educational tearjerker.